


Focus

by lavendrsblue



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Fashion & Models, F/F, Meet-Cute, ennoshita is a photographer, kiyoko is a model, yachi is a makeup artist
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-27
Updated: 2015-08-27
Packaged: 2018-04-16 22:33:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,375
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4642539
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lavendrsblue/pseuds/lavendrsblue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Despite a morning of obstacles, Yachi Hitoka is here and unstoppable - until she turns around and catches sight of the most beautiful person she's ever seen in her two-plus decades of life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Focus

**Author's Note:**

> happy birthday laura! here are some gays to brighten your day.

It’s six forty-five and the sun is already shining; the air is neither too dry nor too humid, and a gentle breeze tickles Yachi’s face. It’s a lovely day for a jog in the park—except Yachi isn’t jogging, she’s sprinting as fast as her legs will carry her, and instead of the park she’s in the heart of Sendai, dodging startled passersby as she leaves the subway station.

She’s late, but it is _not her fault_ this time. First her cat threw up on the kitchen floor—hopefully he’s just eaten another hairball, rather than suffering from a mysterious, life-threatening illness—then Shouyou nearly set the kitchen on fire trying to make breakfast, and _then_ her hair dryer wouldn’t turn on, which is more of a problem today than it usually would be. A hair-and-makeup artist should probably show up to a job looking like she’s actually capable of doing her own.

At least she isn’t tired, even though she realized halfway to the subway that she forgot her tea on the kitchen counter. The adrenaline pumping through her veins is more than enough to shock her awake, despite the early hour. Normally she’d be just waking up at this time, but Ennoshita is accustomed to working with her; he likes to tell her to arrive ten minutes before everyone else to make sure she’ll be on time.

But this time she’s even later than usual. So she bursts through the door of the studio huffing and puffing, having carried her bag up the stairs at a run (the elevator was being serviced—seriously?), words tumbling out of her mouth before her feet have even stopped moving.

“I’m here, Chikara-san!” she shouts, skidding to a stop just inside the door. All activity pauses for a moment before resuming with a kind of collective shrug.

She ducks to avoid a guy carrying a lighting rig and straightens to find Ennoshita striding toward her, camera already slung around his neck. “Perfect timing, Yacchan,” he greets her. He’s already in work mode, heading past her for the rest of his gear, piled on a table behind her. “Shimizu’s train got delayed, so you have a few minutes to spare before she’s here.”

 _Shimizu?_ Yachi racks her brain, but she can’t recall meeting anyone by that name. “Who is that?”

“Our model for today. She’s actually a friend from university.” So no one Yachi is supposed to know, thank goodness.

Ennoshita gives her a rundown of the shoot: all indoors, a lot of close-ups. So nothing too bright or overwhelming, Yachi notes as she lugs her bag over to her designated table in the corner. Makeup is about defining and enhancing, not distracting.

It’s only a few minutes’ work to unload her bag and organize everything. She nods at the arrangement when she’s finished, finally relaxing by a margin. Despite her occasional tardiness, Yachi is, in fact, a very organized person. She plugs in the curling iron and straightens a few brushes, and she’s ready to go. Her morning has been full of obstacles, but nothing can shake her now!

“Yachi will help you over there,” says Ennoshita somewhere behind her, and she spins around.

“I’m right here! It’s nice to meet you,” is what Yachi would have said, if she remembered how to form coherent words and string them into sentences. Normally, this would not be much of a problem. However.

Standing before her is the most beautiful person Yachi has ever seen in her fleeting twenty-two years of life—which is saying something, since she sees a lot of beautiful people in her line of work. The woman in front of her has raven-black hair softly waving past her shoulders, and startling blue-gray eyes. Yachi could get lost in those eyes. They’re the color of the ocean on a stormy day. (Not that Yachi has ever seen the ocean during a storm. She’s lived pretty far inland her entire life, but they’re the color she imagines the ocean might be in that situation.)

“Hello,” says the woman. “Are you Yachi?” Her voice is soft and melodic, like some kind of goddess from ancient mythology. Not that she looks old! She can’t be more than a few years older than Yachi, though she carries herself with so much grace, and dignity, and poise, and—Yachi realizes she’s been gaping for a good ten seconds now, and the woman probably expects an answer.

“Yes!” she blurts, too loudly. “That’s me! Yachi Hitoka, at your service!” Why is she shouting? What if this gorgeous woman thinks she’s deaf or something? Not that that would be a bad thing, just inaccurate. What if she starts signing and Yachi has no idea what she’s trying to say? Will she think Yachi is ignoring her!

“Shimizu Kiyoko,” the woman says. Such a beautiful name. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

 _You too_ , Yachi means to say, but it comes out more like “Yurk!”

Kiyoko looks faintly puzzled, but politely refrains from commenting (which is a relief, because Yachi kind of wants to sink into the ground and disappear). “Shall I sit down?”

“S-sure!” Yachi nods frantically.

Kiyoko shifts her feet, glancing aside; it might be almost awkward if she didn’t have such an air of elegance about her. Yachi wonders why she isn’t going anywhere, until she realizes she’s blocking the only chair and jumps aside with a string of apologies.

Once Kiyoko’s comfortably seated, Yachi turns to the table… and promptly forgets everything she’s ever learned about makeup. Immediately worst-case scenarios spin through her head at top speed. _What if I mess up and make her look like a clown!_ Surely it would squelch any inkling of interest she might have in Yachi—not that she’s already thinking about that or anything, they’ve only just met, that would be _silly_. Yachi Hitoka is not silly at all, she’s very serious! She’s an adult!

Then she hears Ennoshita’s voice drifting over from across the room, giving instructions to someone out of sight. Yachi closes her eyes and inhales deeply. _Focus, Hitoka_ , says her mental Ennoshita, because the real one is busy. Makeup is something she knows backwards, forwards, and upside down; the routine always manages to calm her down, even on her worst days. She settles into that calm now as she works, pushing aside the litany of _oh my gosh oh my gosh_ that Kiyoko’s mere presence sparks in her brain—and before she knows it, she’s dusting finishing powder over Kiyoko’s smooth porcelain skin and stepping back.

“All done,” she announces. “Now you’re perfect!” She grabs a hand mirror to pass over. Kiyoko considers herself in the mirror, tilting her head to one side, and Yachi realizes what she’s said. Her heart, which had calmed slightly while she worked, picks up speed again until she thinks it might hammer out of her chest. “Oh no—I’m not saying my work is perfect! I mean, you looked good before. Wonderful, even!”

“I love it,” Kiyoko interrupts, and smiles directly at her. “Thank you.” Oh no, her _smile_.

“Y-you’re welcome!” Yachi can tell her face is tomato-red. No makeup on Earth can mask a blush hotter than the sun.

Kiyoko gives her reflection a second, contemplative look. It’s odd; she doesn’t seem to be admiring herself or checking for errors the way most models do when Yachi’s finished with them. Her expression is more like Ennoshita’s when he’s putting the finishing edits on a series, or her mother’s when she’s working on a particularly demanding project. (Not that Kiyoko reminds Yachi of her mother at all, oh no.) It’s—analytical, almost calculating, not what Yachi would have expected at all.

“There’s something different about your style, I think,” she says after a moment.

“Different?” Does she secretly hate it!

Kiyoko nods. “You’ve allowed me to look like myself.” She must see the confusion on Yachi’s face, so she continues. “Sometimes when I’m on shoots, I can’t even recognize myself when I see the results, they’ve made me look so different.”

“That’s sad,” blurts Yachi. Kiyoko looks at her in surprise. Yachi has to resist the urge to clap a hand over her mouth, except she stops herself mid-motion, so she makes a kind of weird flailing arm gesture.

“Sometimes that’s what they’re looking for,” says Kiyoko before Yachi can explain herself, “and I’m fine with that. It’s my job. But it’s nice to look in the mirror and be able to see myself. It’s… exciting.”

 _Exciting?!_ “Oh!” Yachi can feel herself blushing harder. Distantly she realizes how tightly she’s gripping her blending brush; she drops it and it clatters to the table. “Yes! I mean, thank you!” She clears her throat, then clears it again, hoping it’ll make her voice less squeaky. “That’s what I hoped to do, actually. Since your face is so—so, uh, nice, I thought it would be a shame if you couldn’t see it.”

Kiyoko laughs—actually _laughs_. It’s only a small one, but Yachi thinks she has never heard a lovelier sound in her life. “You’ve done well, then. Thank you,” she says again, and stands to leave.

Yachi leaps aside to let her pass. As soon as Kiyoko is out of earshot, she slumps into the now-empty chair and lets out a whimper. (The wardrobe guy gives her an odd look.) So she’s managed to survive half an hour in Kiyoko’s presence—but now she has to make it through the rest of a ten-hour shoot. Maybe she should call her doctor preemptively to ask for heart medication.

But as time stretches out and Yachi is called back and forth for touch-ups, she finds that she’s able to minimize her racing-heart sweaty-palm symptoms, by a small margin at least. It’s probably due largely to Ennoshita. His shoots are by far the calmest she’s ever worked on. He minimizes his crew to maximize efficiency, so even though activity is constant and fast-paced, it doesn’t feel like it; there’s an air of competency about everything that’s relaxing. He has that effect on people, she supposes.

Kiyoko seems to relax, too, even though she’s clearly in work mode like Ennoshita. She doesn’t talk to the crew much, but she chats with him easily, and when Yachi darts in for touch-ups Kiyoko brings her into their conversations effortlessly. Yachi feels—comfortable. It’s a novel feeling; usually she can’t stop blushing and stuttering for an entire day when she meets someone new for the first time. (Not that she stops either of those things completely. There’s plenty of garbled half-sentences, prompted by Kiyoko saying her name or smiling or existing in general, that Ennoshita has to interpret. Yachi might be at ease, but she hasn’t been replaced by an android or anything.)

Hours later, Ennoshita calls out the end of the day and everyone flurries into motion again, packing up to leave. Kiyoko’s work is finished, so Yachi’s is too. They ride the elevator down to the lobby together, and Yachi hopes her hands aren’t sweating noticeably as she clutches her makeup bag.

“It was a pleasure to work with you,” says Kiyoko as they step out to the sidewalk. An evening breeze ruffles past, lifting their hair.

“You too!”

“Hitoka-san,” says Kiyoko, after a pause. Something in her tone is a little different than it’s been all day. Yachi turns, and Kiyoko is looking somewhere beyond Yachi’s shoulder instead of at her eye. “Forgive me if this is too forward, but—may I see you again?”

Yachi gulps. “Yes!” she nearly shouts, and blushes furiously. “I mean, I hope to work with you again, yes!”

“Ah… That’s not what I meant.”

She looks up—wow, Kiyoko is so tall, she must have at least five inches on Yachi—and Kiyoko is looking straight at her. Her cheeks look really pink. That’s funny, Yachi doesn’t remember using that color of blush on her. “Sorry?”

“I meant, would you like to get dinner sometime? If you’re not too busy, that is.”

Yachi blinks, and then she floats away, out the door and up into the sky, over the tree-lined streets of Sendai and to the ocean and straight up into the sun where she’s going to stay for the rest of her existence.

“Hah,” she manages, faintly.

A line appears between Kiyoko’s eyebrows as she frowns. “Is... that a no?”

Yachi slams back down to Earth. “What? No!” she gasps. “I mean—no, that was a yes! Yes, I would very much like to go on a, a…” Her voice fails her then, so instead of _date_ she kind of chokes out _deh_. Thankfully Kiyoko seems to gather her meaning anyway.

“Okay.” She smiles. Yachi feels dizzy. “Are you free on Saturday?”

“Yes! Wait, no.” She fights through the spinning haze consuming her brain, calling up her mental calendar. “I have a wedding that day. That I’m doing makeup for. I’m not getting married!”

“Maybe you can go home and check your calendar,” suggests Kiyoko, gently, “and text me when you have time?”

“Sure! You can do that. Or I can. Here—” Yachi fumbles for her phone and unlocks it with some difficulty, thrusting it at Kiyoko. Kiyoko’s phone is sleek and black, not like Yachi’s with its bright pink shatterproof case and Hello Kitty charm. “So I’ll just—do that, then. Text you,” she says, once they’ve handed their respective phones back. “Soon! Tonight, even.”

“That sounds good.” Kiyoko smiles at her again, but this time Yachi grins back with all the excitement jittering in her limbs that she can’t put into words. “I’ll talk to you soon.”

The subway ride home seems like the shortest Yachi’s ever taken. She spends the entire time staring down at her phone clutched tightly in both hands, now containing Kiyoko’s _phone number_ , more than she ever hoped she’d get. When she gets home, she doesn’t even pause to say hello to the cat or kick aside the volleyball shoes Shouyou left piled by the door. She bypasses the shoes and the cat and everything else to flop onto the couch, mash her face into a pillow, and shriek: a fitting end to what was probably (definitely) the best day of her entire life.


End file.
